


Run and run and run

by pprfaith



Series: Run [4]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Southern Vampire Mysteries - Charlaine Harris, True Blood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Disability, F/M, Ficlets, Gen, Outtakes, Podfic Available, Romance, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2017-12-08 09:39:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Outtakes from my Run!Miniseries. Written for various prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. nevermind me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Wishlist 2010

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Wishlist 2009.

+

They have been sitting in the VIP area of Eric’s latest club for more than an hour, listening to a vampire named Vincent propose a business deal.

Eric is sitting across from the man, one arm along the back of the sofa. Buffy – who has long since become Josie, even in his mind, because her old name is not only dangerous, but also unfitting and disgraceful – is sprawled across the remaining space next to him, more lying than sitting. It irritates their guest and she knows it, which is why she does it. Apparently, the vampire likes to think of her naked.

That, in turn, irritates her.

Vincent blathers on and on, an expression of consternation and concentration on his face, colored by his obvious dislike of being made to include a human in the conversation. Eric wonders how one so stupid survived so long and decides to put an end to this farce of a business meeting. It’s not as if he has any intentions to make deals with someone who has been staring at true power for over an hour and still not recognized it. Noticing the obvious is a necessary skill when one swims with sharks.

Eric, of course, being one of the sharks. Vincent is not worth his time.

He turns to look at Josie, wrapping a strand of her bright blonde hair around his fingers. “What do you think, darling?”

It’s her cue to put the cards on the table and she grins widely. She, too, is one of the sharks, has long since grown comfortable in that role.

“Well,” she begins, straightening. “First of all, I think that Vincent here is a bad researcher.”

The man in question grows wide-eyed at the sudden change in pace, and confused.

“Why?” Eric demands, smirking calmly.

“Because he researched you and me just enough to figure out who I pretend to be, but not who I am. Sloppy, Vinnie, very sloppy.” She wags a finger at him mockingly. “Then, of course, there’s the fact that he thinks you’re weak for keeping your human toy around the way you do. Tying directly into the wrong intel resulting from the first point. Again, Vinnie, sloppy. Instead of watching and drawing conclusions, you try to force preconceived notions on us. That’s great if you want to join the KKK, but not so useful in real life.

“Three,” here her smile grows vicious, “I’m pretty sure we just passed a test. And you failed it.” Her gaze goes to Marco, the silent bodyguard Vincent brought with him. The man has been standing in the background silently for the entire conversation, watching. It was a ploy, meant to test Eric, but it backfired because Josie picked the intent right out of their guests’ heads the minute they walked in the door. Marco is the true power, Vincent his sock-puppet. And he just failed spectacularly.

Vincent pales and jerks around to stare at his master, putting the last nail on his coffin. If Josie had been only bluffing, he would have just given everything away. Again, Eric wonders how the vampire survived as long as he has.

“And last but not least,” his little sister adds, just because she can, “If you think about me naked one more time, I will claw your eyes out. Clear?”

Vincent stutters, incoherently, fear plain on his face. Josie leans back and enjoys the show, feeling no guilt at taking pleasure from the misfortune of someone like him. Eric has feared once that keeping a human around would mean moral and ethics, but while Josie is a fierce defender of all innocents, she has surprisingly little sympathy for those that cause her or him harm.

She was different once, he’s sure of that, but living inside people’s darkest thoughts tends to taint one’s outlook on the world. The idiot looks to him for help – to reign in his human, he still doesn’t get it, does he? He just smirks and watches as Marco steps forward, tapping Vincent on the shoulder and wordlessly sending him away. He goes, tail between his legs, and the true master takes the stage.

“I hadn’t believed the rumors,” he says, by way of introduction. “A telepath. But it seems true, no?” He has a hint on a hard accent, Russian maybe. An old one. Powerful. But not nearly as powerful as Eric the Northman.

“Indeed,” he confirms, never having seen reason to hide his prize from the world.

“May I make you an offer, Miss?” He turns to Josie after Eric’s negligent wave of a hand, inviting him to go on.

“You can try,” the former slayer tells him.

“Very well. A house, your own business, a generous allowance. I will give you all that, if you put yourself in my service. I also would not ask any… physical favors of you.”

The last is said with a hooded look in Eric’s direction, implication clear. The Viking frowns, displeased. True, the relationship between him and his ‘sister’ is not that of true siblings, but rather more physical at times, but the implication Marco is making is cheap and degrading. He growls low in his throat.

“She is my sister.” The stress on ‘my’ rather than ‘sister’. Beside him, Josie still lies motionless, her head half on his shoulder. She has not reacted to the offer in any way, out loud or in their heads.

“Please, Northman, we all know this girl is not your sister.”

“And yet she is mine. You cannot have her. And neither your bold offer, nor your subterfuge have endeared you to me. I suggest you leave.”

Behind the bar, at the doors, on the dance floor, the vampires belonging to Eric lay down their work and tense, prepared to fight as they feel their leader’s anger rise to fill the room. Marco, knowing when to bow out gracefully, stands, but not without a last look at the telepath he obviously came for.

She straightens finally, looking him dead in the eye and Eric holds his breath because he just called Josie ‘his’ and there is no telling how she will react. Two years she has been with him, but he has never before claimed her so plainly. Independent, stubborn and proud as she is, she might agree to go with the other vampire just because of that.

But all she does is incline her head slightly and stare at Marco hard. He blanches, obviously hearing her inside his head, and leaves as fast as decorum will allow. She watches him go before turning to Eric, curious expression on her face.

You really think I’m gonna blow up over a possessive pronoun?

His lips twitch involuntarily. He doesn’t even jump anymore when she enters his head, entirely used to having her there, almost an extension of his thoughts, a presence at the very back that never quite leaves, even during the day. A curious feeling for one that has kept himself solitary for a thousand years, but strangely pleasant.

She smiles. Exactly.

He frowns at her statement and waits, knowing she knows his confusion as well as he does. And you don’t mind me being there.

So?

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I freak people out. But you… you don’t mind me in your head and I don’t mind. I just don’t mind.

Ah. He nods, understanding what she can’t quite put into words, even in their heads, where language is a lot more flexible than outside of them. He is there, and so is she. They live beside, above, below and inside each other and that needs to titles, no definitions.

There.

That’s all they are for each other. All they need to be.

They have their reasons.

Yeah, she thinks and lies back down where he can wrap his fingers in her hair and watch the goings on in the club, king of all he surveys.

+


	2. flesh and blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The actual 'flesh and blood' ficlet, instead of the wrong one.

Angel scans their surroundings as he helps Willow out of the car and waits for her to get comfortable. It’s dark and hot, a wet heat that makes his skin feel sticky despite the fact that he doesn’t have body heat. 

That’s Louisiana for you, he guesses. He hasn’t really been here since the prohibition, and then only in winter.

Willow smiles up at him, her eyes crinkling and sincere as always. He marvels sometimes, how she can still be like this, content with life, accepting of all she has been dealt. It’s been almost ten years and she has long since gotten over what happened to her, but he definitely has not. Every time he looks at her, this small, gentle, fragile woman framed in hard black and steel lines, he wants to find a away to resurrect the things that did this to her and kill them. Again. Again.

Willow says he’s projecting. She says he wishes there had been someone to kill in Buffy’s name, not hers. He doesn’t know if that’s true, doesn’t really want to. He loved Buffy brilliantly for two years and he has loved Willow in a different, a passionless and quiet way, for twenty. One a lover, one a friend. If he could, he would avenge them both equally.

But tonight, they have someone else to save. The girl’s name is Devon and she’s an untrained witch in the debt of a vampire. Willow wants to get her out so she can join the Coven, be trained. Mostly so she is among her kind, not alone, not outcast. Not like Buffy was, scared and young and alone, on the run for something she couldn’t help, couldn’t change.

Willow doesn’t want anyone to die the way Buffy did and so she collects lost, special children and Angel helps her, because he owes the universe a million lives more than he can ever save.

He closes the car door and eyes the long line of Goths waiting in front of the bar. There is a garish red logo in neon writing above the door that proclaims the place to be called _Fantasia_. His lips curl in disgust at the whole thing, the fangbangers, the freak show air about the place. He’s not a fan of mainstreaming because he knows what lies under the skin, he knows that all those vampires playing sheep are doing just that, playing. 

Sooner or later they all slip up. Sooner or later, people die. Better for the monsters to stay monsters. Makes them easier to kill, too. 

There’s a bark of laughter from his right and he follows it into the dark recesses of the parking lot, finds a teenaged couple standing outside the circle of light cast by the club. They are both short, the guy stocky and dark haired, wearing grey from head to toe, jeans, loafers, knitted shirt. She’s wearing red skinny jeans and a black shirt, expensive heels. They’re young and obviously rich, probably here for the thrill of the big, bad vampires, but so obviously underage that they’ll never make it past the statuesque blonde manning the entrance, fangs extended for show.

He pushes Willow past the line of waiting idiots and is about to tell her their business when she waves them through. Obviously she knows who they are and that they are here to speak with the Sheriff of Area Five.

Angel sneers at her while Willow smiles and then he hefts her chair up the single step and pushes her inside.

.

“No,” the Sheriff says half an hour later, reclining in his throne like some debauched lord, tall and pretty and cold as marble. Angel hated him on sight, hates him more after watching him for a while. He’s arrogant and vain, too sure of his power, too sure that he will always win.

He would have liked to teach the other man a lesson, but he’s old. Old enough for his weight to feel like lead on Angel’s tongue. He would be dead before he got to the stake in his waistband. 

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Willow says, still calm, still friendly despite her mounting frustration, with the vampire before her and the whole situation. The music and noise of the bar are throbbing around them and on the raised dais they were led to, she’s on exhibit like an attraction at a zoo. What’s the old chick in the wheelchair doing here?

Angel grits his teeth and Willow goes on, the patience of a saint. “Devon owes you money, correct?”

“Yes.”

“We are willing to settle her debt if you release her from your service. You get the money a lot quicker than if she works it off on a waitress’s salary.”

“Yes. But I also lose credibility if I let anyone buy anyone else off.” He smirks and Angel wants to see his fist buried in his face. It would be beautiful. 

To curb the impulse, he looks around, studying the dance floor. It’s sprinkled liberally with vampires, all of them playing the crowd, all of them with half an eye on the proceedings surrounding their master. A good little flock, he thinks with disdain.

Then he sees a flash of grey in a sea of black and realizes the teenagers made it in after all. They are dancing, the girl with her hands buried in her blonde hair, hips swaying. The boy has his hands on her hips, is whispering something to her. He doesn’t look a day over sixteen.

The girl swings him around and dances around him in the same move. Suddenly, they both have their back to Angel and she curls her arms around him, grinding into his chest. He’s involuntarily reminded of another blonde dancing with another brunette boy twenty years ago. Buffy was trying to rile him up by dancing with Xander and it worked. God, he hated how she made him feel then. 

Now he misses it, would give anything to have her around still. Everyone tells him to move on, but he hasn’t quite figured out how, haunted by a girl twenty years dead. It’s pathetic.

“Do you let in kindergarteners, too?” he wants to know, turning back to the conversation, cutting the Sheriff off mid-sentence. Bad manners, that, but they’re not going to get what they want anyway. The man is far too petty to let them have Devon.

“I beg your pardon?” the other vampire says and Angel points to the grey boy and his red-and-black girlfriend, “Those two are way too young to be in here.”

Northman follows the line of his finger. Then he throws his head back and laughs. “Oh, my friend,” and doesn’t that makes Angel grind his teeth, “You have spent too long slinking around humans. That ‘boy’ is my Maker.”

Angel whirls around, looks at the boy. Rosy cheeks, modern clothes, easy smile. He doesn’t look like someone older than the Sheriff, but he must be. Angel tries to feel the weight of him, but there are too many other corpses in the room, too many ages and powers. Still, “And the girl’s his dinner?”

Biting, angry. Willow puts a hand on his arm to calm him. It doesn’t help. Northman shakes his head and, without raising his voice, calls her name. “Josie.”

Impossibly, she hears him.

And she turns around.

.

She turns around and Angel is thrown backwards in time, twenty years into the past, into a rundown club called _The Bronze_ , a dark place, filled with shadows, and a face filled with light standing out of the crowd.

So beautiful.

Willow cries out, soft and choked, grief and disbelief.

.

‘Josie’ and the Maker are there suddenly, at the table, no movement between there and here, just suddenly…. She bends low over the Sheriff’s chair, her hair obscuring her face. Angel feels like he can almost move again. 

The Maker studies him, the full weight of age hitting the souled vampire, crippling him as surely as shock did a moment ago. Oldoldold. 

The blonde, the girl, Josie, the… she whispers, “Let’s take this to the office.”

For an endless ten seconds, the two blondes stare at each other, utterly silent and motionless, unblinking. Then the Sheriff’s eyes widen, almost imperceptibly, he nods. He rises and the Maker takes hold of the handles of Willow’s wheelchair, pushing her toward a backdoor, leaving Angel no choice but to find his limbs again and move.

.

He stares. The door closes behind him, leaving him and Willow trapped with two Ancients between them and the exit, but he just stares. He can’t… she’s… she’s… 

“You haven’t aged.”

It’s the very first thing he says to the girl he believed dead for the past two decades and it’s all he can think of. Beside him, Willow laughs, voice slick with tears. 

Silence. 

Behind them, Northman snorts. “Well,” he drawls, insufferably amused, “Isn’t this lovely. Josie?”

He doesn’t ask an actual question, but she still answers by shaking her head. Then  
Buffy raises one hand to wave and says, “Hi, guys.”

.

Angel can’t react, can’t speak. Those three words took everything out of him and now he can only stare. God, when people talk of ghosts of the past, they can’t mean _this_ , can’t mean dead girls that look like they did when they disappeared, flawless and perfect and _alive_.

Buffy takes his utter shock in stride, kneeling instead in front of Willow, clutching the woman’s hands. It’s bizarre, to see two childhood friends, one of them a woman of forty, the other a girl young enough to be her daughter.

“Wills,” Buffy whispers, “Oh, Wills, what happened?”

Willow opens her mouth to answer, tears flowing freely down her paper white cheeks, her smile impossibly wide and scared. She holds on to Buffy’s hands with more strength than a human should have. 

Before she makes a single sound, Buffy rears back, eyes wide with surprise and sadness. “Oh,” she says, “Oh, I am so, so sorry. I…”

She still reads thoughts.

“Yes, I do.” To Angel.

He jumps. The vampires laugh. “You get used to it,” the Maker offers, speaking for the first time. Northman dryly adds, “Eventually.”

He sounds a lot more human, suddenly. “Don’t let him hear you say that,” Buffy smirks up at him. “He doesn’t like it.”

Northman sighs and she giggles and Willow finally breaks the almost hysteric giddiness permeating the room by asking, “How are you alive?”

Buffy, Josie, what’s her name now? What does he call her?

“Josie, if you don’t mind.”

“Stop that,” he snaps, then cringes. She grins wryly. “Eric helped me disappear. He faked my death and gave me a job. I wanted to come back, guys, I swear. But by the time the Council stopped being a problem, ten years had passed and I thought… you were better off without me.”

Willow smiles, forgiving, always so forgiving. But then, Angel can’t find it in himself to be angry for twenty years of deception either. Not when she’s here, alive, breathing. She looks like she did then, but she has a heartbeat, so she’s alright, still alive, still here and still so, so beautiful, still the golden girl she was, and he… he can…

“Angel,” she says, suddenly looking straight at him, her hands still twined with Willow’s on top of the red-head’s useless legs, shattered beyond saving, spine broken, in a fight, so long ago. Ages ago. But still long after Buffy left. After she died. In her name. Willow lost her legs fighting for a boy just like her once best friend, alone and scared. She lost her legs in Buffy’s name and Buffy flinches as those thoughts cross Angel’s mind, squeezes Willow’s hands tighter. But her gaze never wavers from Angel, never flinches as she says, “Don’t.”

She’s not talking about Willow’s injury. “Don’t go there,” she warns.

He shakes his head, looks at the other two vampires, silent and powerful, cold. He wonders if she loves them, the boy that isn’t a boy and the arrogant Viking. “I…”

He doesn’t know what to say. What do you say to a ghost that’s suddenly flesh and blood? ‘I love you’ sounds right, but it won’t pass his lips.

“You didn’t look for me.”

He jerks, surprised. Funny, he thought the ability to be surprised left him when he saw her on the dance floor. 

“I wanted to,” he says, defense weak.

“Why didn’t you?”

Willow frees one hand and starts running it through long, blonde hair gently, like she used to when they had girls’ nights in. She told him that once, him and Xander, when they were both drunk and he watched over them because they were all he had left of Buffy.

Buffy doesn’t stop her and he looks away from the picture they make, so right, so wrong. Bizarre. Twisted.

“The Hellmouth,” he answers.

She snorts and stands, Willow’s hands falling away. “Buffy?”

Buffy look down and her expression softens. “Oh, Wills,” she whispers, yet again. 

The older woman laughs, bats at her. “Oh, stop treating me like an insecure seventeen-year-old girl. I missed you. I love you. You’re my best friend. I won’t disappear, as long as you promise the same. I just wanted to know if you’re okay? You went a bit jumpy there.”

Buffy giggles. “Christ, you perfected the mothering, didn’t you? Yes, I promise not to disappear again. If I’d known,” she waves a hand at useless limbs in pretty pants, “I never would have…”

“I know,” Willow assures.

And just like that, they’re best friends again. Angel envies them so badly it hurts. And then Buffy turns to him and says, “I was eighteen. I was sick. I was alone. I was scared and on the run from a squad of trained killers. Fuck the Hellmouth, Angel, I needed you, and you never came.”

The part where she’s right is what hurts the most, so he looks away. “I know,” he whispers, and he does. Lord help him, he does, and not a night has passed in the past two decades, where he hasn’t thought of her, young and alone out there, dying with no-one to hold her hand and tell her that things would be okay.

 _Twenty years, Angel,_ she says, but she doesn’t speak at all. She’s in his head. She couldn’t do that when she left. _That’s a long time to grieve._

_Not long enough_ , he thinks at her.

_I don’t blame you, so stop blaming yourself. But I’m not the naïve, starry-eyed girl I was either._

_I love you._

_Loved,_ she corrects, not unkindly. 

_That’s not fair._

_No,_ she agrees readily, _it’s not_.

He frowns and turns his head away. He looks at Willow, who’s watching their silent interaction with a look of amused confusion on her face. So easy to forgive, so sweet and gentle and strong. He loved Buffy for two bright, burning years. He’s loved Willow for twenty slow, painful ones, first because she was Buffy’s and then for herself. For her vision and her determination. Xander, too, and Giles and everything Buffy left behind. In her name. Always, always in her name.

He looks at Buffy again and finds himself staring at a teenage girl with eyes that don’t match the rest of her. He loved her ghost, would have loved it forever. But this is flesh and bone and looking at her, really looking at her in her high heels and expensive blouse, her make-up a bit too heavy and her quick glances at the other two vampires a bit too familiar, she’s not the girl he loved.

“Wonderful,” she suddenly chirps, “Now, let’s finish that business thing of yours and then I have to sit in on two more meetings for Eric and after that, we have twenty years of gossip to catch up on!” She grins at Willow, at him, at Northman and the Maker, still nameless.

She bounces a bit on her heels and it’s familiar and wrong, off somehow. Twisted. And he doesn’t know if it’s his memory that’s distorted or her, but she doesn’t look right, in this place, these clothes. With these people. She tilts her head at Northman, obviously saying something in his head and then looks at Angel, smiling.

It’s a bright and beautiful thing, that smile, but it doesn’t make the sun rise like it does in his memories and Angel feels a twenty years overdue weight lift from his shoulders and suddenly there are no ghosts anymore.

Only people.

.


	3. a thousand more

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Wishlist 2012

+

Sometimes, living forever gets boring. 

Sometimes, it gets downright tedious.

Over the years you have developed coping mechanisms to deal with the boredom. Back in the day, a little killing spree worked nicely. Then, with the dawn of the modern age, you packed up shop and moved whenever the ennui hit you. 

It’s how you ended up in the New World in the first place.

You turned Pam because you were really, really bored that decade and for almost a century, her snarking and bitching and loyalty kept you entertained. 

When she left you to make her own way, you went back to wandering. You built a business, kept is from anywhere between two years and a decade, and then you pulled up your stakes – Josie would laugh at this pun – and moved on. 

Until 1984, when a teenage girl with a bad dye-job tumbled, quite literally into your way, knives flashing and mind slipping into yours like it had always been there. 

You were enchanted. 

So you kept her, because you are a greedy, selfish creature and you _wanted_ her. 

With her by your side, name from a song, face of an angel, tongue of a devil, the most mundane things became interesting because for all that she is unaging and part demon, a larger part of her is human and it had been a long, long time since you spent any time around one of those. 

You woke in the evenings to find your room rearranged around you, or to find her dancing to the radio in her underwear. Once you rose to find the entire kitchen covered in cooling cookie trays, a grinning, flour streaked Josie in the middle of it all, cheering about how baking wasn’t all that hard, once you had it figured out.

The next night you rose to the sound of retching because apparently even Josie’s system cannot take more than two pounds of cookies a day. 

She tethered you to the here and now, to things other than blood and sex and boredom. She made life interesting. 

And as soon as she noticed that you actually _enjoyed_ her shenanigans – which was soon because she is a _telepath_ \- she decided to make a job of it. 

“I mean, as long as you’re entertained, you’re less likely to slaughter everyone and set yourself up as king of the world, so hey, public service, right?”

But then Godric came. 

Or rather, you found him, locked in a basement, tired and silent in a way you’d never seen. Beaten. Worn. 

You actually felt it, like a physical thing, when Josie’s laser focus shifted from you to your maker. She made him her new priority. 

Keep Godric alive, keep him here, keep him bound to this plane, this body, this life. After Dallas, she took him to festivals and carnivals, took him on joyrides in Eric’s most expensive cars, signed them up for late night writing classes and spent them writing bad porn. She dragged him across the globe in search of his old haunts and made them new for him, made them shine again.

She made him tell her everything he knew about Rome while they meandered through the eternal city’s back alleys and she kissed him after every ice-cream flavor she tried, so he could taste them, too. 

She let you see and hear and feel, sometimes, what they did when they were not with you, here, in Louisiana. She pulled you into your head and let you kiss Godric, too, let you feel the slide of cool flavors against her tongue. 

Sometimes. 

Most of the time, though, she was too busy keeping one vampire alive, for a given value of the word, to spend much time on keeping another entertained. 

It’s been months since ice-cream in Rome and you haven’t heard of nor seen them since that night. You know that they are well, can feel them thrumming steadily, one at the center of your chest, one in the back of your mind. They are alive. 

But they are not here. 

They are not here and you are terribly, terribly bored.

“Could you look any more annoyed? We’re going to start losing customers at this rate, Master,” Pamela chides from her place beside your ‘throne’ at the back of Fangtasia, visible to all. When you sit in this chair, you are as much part of the decoration as the red walls and the black furniture. 

“Let them go,” you rumble, head propped in your hand, legs long in front of you. “As a matter of fact, kick them all out and let me burn the place down.”

She laughs, head thrown back, her black lace corset shaking with the force of it. “You wouldn’t do that,” she retorts, entirely too sure.

“Wouldn’t I?” you ask.

She nods and bends low, seductively purring into your ear. It’s all an act, all for the vermin watching, enthralled, from the dancefloor. Your fangs itch to descend, to show them what a vampire really is, outside this ridiculous fake-gothic setting, outside the costumes and rules.

At the beginning, when you were still half drunk with being _known_ after a thousand years of living in the dark, you thought this was a good idea. To _flaunt_ yourself and spit in the faces of the humans that didn’t believe you existed. 

It’s only tedious now.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Pamela tells you, low and intimate, as if you are lovers, as if you want to rip each other’s clothes off. The two of you have not been lovers in two hundred years, almost. All for show. “Because then you’d have to bottle it, and I know how you hate that sludge.”

True Blood. Whoever claimed that it tastes like the real thing has obviously never tasted blood in their life. 

You grind your teeth at the reminder that, along with Josie’s entertainment value, your only steady food source has gone. Her blood is potent and willingly given and a thousand times sweeter than that of the fangbangers you have been reduced to these past few months. They taste like they look, stale, used and cheap. 

Sookie promised to taste sweet and vibrant, but Sookie denies you at every turn, always taking and never giving. You never valued Josie’s moral flexibility and willingness to adapt until you met the other telepath and realized how hard your own could have made your life for you. Sookie clings to human values, clings to her raising, to what she thinks is true and right and good. Sookie clings, most of all, to Bill Goddamn Compton, out of naiveté as much as love. 

Sookie is as out of reach as Josie, so your choices are between fangbangers and True Blood.

You growl low in your throat and consider calling your telepath and _ordering_ her back. You are her master. She would come.

“Are you about to throw a tantrum?” Pam breaks into your thoughts, sounding entirely too amused.

“Fuck off,” you snarl, half trying to figure out if there are matches in your office. If you do it after closing, maybe spray a few hateful slogans on the walls, it could be passed off as a hate crime. Insurance might even kick in. If you gave it to Pam for new shoes, she might not rat you out. 

You’re seriously considering the merit of the idea when the front door of Fangtasia opens and in comes the last person you expect.

Your maker.

Your maker, wearing fashionably tight jeans and a faded bandshirt, along with those blasted white-capped sneakers you’ve been seeing everywhere for decades. His cheeks look rosy and well fed and you can’t help the brief thought of _at least someone is getting decent blood_.

The ringing laughter inside your skull is as startling as it’s been sorely missed. 

Josie follows in Godric’s wake dressed in sparkly high heels, purple leggings and a white man’s shirt thrown over top, cinched tight with a broad belt. They are both so fashionable and painfully _young_ that they stick out like sore thumbs, turning heads as they go. 

A few of the new vampires you have collected in the wake of Katrina are pointing and staring and you can hear Clancy and the others whispering names in their ears. Josie, Godric. Telepath, maker. 

Godric smiles slightly and Josie cheerfully waves at the waitresses as she passes them and dissonance between the way they look and act and what they are – older than Christianity and capable of driving a man insane with nothing but the power of her mind, respectively – is jarring. It sends a pleasant shiver of dark delight down your spine.

Beside you, Pam snorts delicately. “Looks like I can stop hiding the flammables,” she remarks and then glides down the dais to peck both Josie and Godric on the cheek before disappearing to man the door in a rare show of tact. 

Or maybe it’s a statement, because as Pam pointedly leaves you alone, so do the rest of your underlings turn back to their work and dinners. 

And then your lost terrors reach you.

 _That’s not very nice,_ Josie laughs and something twisted flashes through you before you can hide it. Her smile wavers a bit. _I’m sorry_ , she says.

It encompasses six months of radio silence, of leaving you alone, of cutting you out, of simply not being _there_ , of making you _care_ and then disappearing, of making you _worry_ , of all gods-forsaken things.

She adds to the apology by giving you a quick kiss and a deeper than usual bow before she climbs onto the left arm of your chair and settling there, her legs crossing yours, her hand going to the nape of your neck and tangling there like it was never gone.

Something slots into place. Not in your heart, no, not that. But in your head. Some forgotten part, a warmth across old memories that you had almost forgotten already, a soft tinge to your thought processes. Your telepath, burrowing back into your mind, retaking her place, restaking her claim. 

“I’ve got your mark on my neck, buddy,” she once told you when you realized she never fully withdrew, “I get my own claim. And it’s not like you know any telepaths that might see.”

You know Sookie now, and even she has never seen, never noticed, because she is blind to your mind entirely. You find yourself feeling almost sorry for that, even as you are glad there isn’t another mind reader sneaking around your deepest, darkest memories. 

_I missed you_ , she confesses, mercifully not out loud. You rest a hand on her thigh and let her be. 

_As have I_ , Godric echoes and this is new, three people in this web of Josie’s making. Your little part-demon has been learning new tricks. 

_As have I,_ Godrics says, yet again, and you barely have time to catch his meaning before he repeats Josie’s motions, a bow, a kiss, and then a seat on the other arm of your throne. He tangles his legs with Josie’s across yours and leans into your shoulder, smiling slightly, content and full of mischief. 

They just rest there, young and beautiful and vibrant bookends, teasing you, cocooning you. Apologizing, wordlessly. 

Most of the room is gaping. 

Ask if you give a fucking damn. 

You wrap arms around both their waists and listen as they spin tales of their exploits inside your head, showing more than telling, letting you see all that you have missed. Letting you witness your maker slowly coming back to life, laughing, playing in a way he never has for as long as you’ve been alive.

He’s lost his seriousness, you realize, his put-upon air of age and suffering. It’s why he looks so young. 

Finally Josie tires of just _showing_ and demands, “Come on, I wanna go somewhere.”

Form the tone of her voice, she has something very specific in mind. You try to peek, but she throws you out. Godric laughs. You are beginning to enjoy this new three-way connection. 

You let yourself be pulled to your feet by four small hands, let yourself be led out the visitor’s entrance, past your bemused child.

“Pammie, be a star and lock up, wouldja?” Josie hollers, making a comical show out of shoving you forward, while Godric pretends, badly, to have a hard time pulling you by the arm. 

Half your reputation is probably out the window after the display, but you find yourself laughing a toothy laugh instead of being annoyed. 

They drag-shove you all the way down the block and into a dark alley, where Josie jumps on your back, wrapping you up in limbs and jerking a thumb skywards directly in front of your face. You almost go cross-eyed trying to see it.

“Up ya go, bossman,” she orders and digs her heels into your sides. 

You growl at her, but when Godric lifts off, you follow him into the night. 

You fly, north and east, across borders, up and out, until you start to worry about making in back before the sun, but Josie clings to your neck and laughs into your mind and says, _We’ll be fine_.

You believe her.

Gods help you, you always do.

Ahead of you, Godric suddenly drops out of the sky. 

You find him again at the edge of a rocky pool in the middle of nowhere.

 _Nearest humans are fifty miles out_ , Josie explains, still silent. You are all very silent, except for the sound of her breathing and heartbeat. 

Godric sits on the highest rock above the head of the little pool, his feet dangling over the edge. He’s barefoot and you don’t know where he left his shoes. You look around and find no signs of civilization anywhere, not even light on the horizon. You wonder how they found this place and then you don’t anymore because Josie’s belt is dropping to the hard ground followed by her heels and shirt and leggings and then she’s naked and shooting a quick grin at you over her shoulder before jumping. 

She shrieks against the cold and Godric laughs, leaving a pile of clothes on his perch as he follows her, staying under water until the ripples of his entrance fade and then pouncing on the telepath, pulling her down. 

You watch them play for a while, transfixed by their playfulness, their exuberance. You have never seen either of them like this.

 _Hey, Eric, did I tell you?_ her voice suddenly echoes. _We went to that hotel where you found me, remember?_

As if you could forget her, fire, blood, death and defiance, a wry smile on her lips and a knife in each hand. 

_There’s a vampire bar now. Total dive. It’s called _The Last Fang_. Total irony, right?_

“She gave a blow by blow description of the fight in the middle of the bar,” Godric adds, coming up with a spluttering blonde in his arms.

She gasps, elbows him in the ribs and then kicks both feet toward you, splashing you. “So are you coming in, or not?”

+


End file.
